Hi!
Now that MB officially has genres, I have a question about them: What do we assign a genre to? My first reflex would be to assign it to a work rather than a recording or a release. Maybe this is a bias since I almost exclusively edit classical stuff, but could there be a way so that all recordings of the Christmas Oratorio get the genre “baroque” just because they are recordings of the Christmas Oratorio instead of having to go through all the individual recordings of the work? Maybe even a way to propagate genre (along maybe with other tags) to subworks like all the parts of the Christmas Oratorio? I guess it would apply essentially to classical stuff (will it?) but could this be thinkable?
I’m not fully sure that’d be appropriate - would a heavy metal version of a Bach piece still have the genre “baroque”? Maybe it would, but not fully sure.
That said, tags can be submitted through the API. Which means @loujin or someone could probably write a script where you can click a button on a work page and it submits the tag (genre) to all sub-works or whatnot.
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Just a quick but related note about Picard and genre propagation, there’s an option to fall back on artist’s genres if no genres are found for release or release group:
That’s far from perfect, but usually genres set for an artist make sense for his albums.
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Just that this is broken due to the JSON Webservice not returning the data as the XML service did 
See https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1288
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Thanks, I wasn’t aware of these possibilities.
Thinking about Classical only, this would make sense. Thinking about it from a more meta perspective, it makes less sense. Transferring the concept to other areas, would mean that covers of a song would get the same genre. For example; “The Gourds” cover of “Gin and Juice.” I don’t really see that fitting under Rap or Hip-Hop like Dr. Dre’s version.
I support propagating some tags, especially Genre, from the release group to the individual releases.
I understand that the concern with Picard is that pulling information from the release group results in many more hits to MusicBrainz, because it would have to pull data from the individual release, and the group. It seems to me, that there is some information that would be same for the release, as it would be for the group.
I’m operating on the theory that what I see on the page for the release, is what is available to Picard. I see fields for “Release group rating” and “Release group reviews.” Why not “Release group Genre?” Or just plain Genre. This seems like one of the things that should flow down to the release.
Maybe to increase the number of genre tags, I suggest that:
- obligatory entering a genre when adding an album / artist
or - automatically adding a genre to a newly added album based on the artist’s genre (if it already exists)
In addition, we have a voting system that theoretically should eliminate the wrong genres. If that had happened.
What do you say?
Number 2 maybe. I dislike genres in general. They’re too fuzzy and subjective for me.
That wouldn’t work - sometimes I need to enter data without actually having any idea which is the artist’s genre (for example when a track has been added to an artist I follow, but it’s instead by a different artist of the same name).
There’s no real benefit to that - for the same effect, the artist can be checked for genres while tagging. That avoids automatically adding genres that might not apply to a specific release (group), but still allows people to tag with them if they’re not bothered they might not always be correct.
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@hbrtkp Please no. Don’t force genres onto people. Everyone has a different opinion. So we all categorise music in different ways.
If someone wants to add genre tags, then go ahead. But making it compulsory will lead to a lot more junk data.
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I completely ignore genre so we should leave it optional, like ratings.
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